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Robert Lee Frost was an American poet

Convinced that the poem was deeply personal and directly self-revelatoryFrost's readers have insisted on tracing the poem to one or the other of twofacts of Frost's life when he was in his late thirties. (At the beginning of theDante is thirty-five, "midway on the road of life,"notes Charles Eliot Norton.) The first of these, an event, took place in thewinter of 1911-1912 in the woods of Plymouth, New Hampshire, while the second, ageneral observation and a concomitant attitude, grew out of his long walks inEngland with Edward Thomas, his newfound Welsh-English poet-friend, in 1914.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

The "fun" is "outside," and lies in doing something like teasing,suggesting formulae that don't formulate, or not quite. The fun is not in being"essentially intellectual" or in manifesting "intellectual enthusiasm"in Meiklejohn's sense of the phrase, but in being "subtle," and not just subtlebut so much so as to fool "the casual person" into thinking that what you saidwas obvious. If we juxtapose these remarks with his earlier determination to reach out asa poet to all sorts and kinds of people, and if we think of "The Road Not Taken"as a prime example of a poem which succeeded in reaching out and taking hold, thensomething interesting emerges about the kind of relation to other people, to readers - orto students and college presidents - Frost was willing to live with, indeed to cultivate.

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For the large moral meaning which "The Road Not Taken" seems to endorse - go,as I did, your own way, take the road less traveled by, andit will make "allthe difference"-does not maintainitself when the poem is looked at morecarefully. Then one notices how insistent is the speaker on admitting, at the time of hischoice, that the two roads were in appearance "really about the same," that they"equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black," and that choosing onerather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearlythan to say that the road taken had "perhaps the better claim." But in the finalstanza, as the tense changes to future, we hear a different story, one that will be told"with a sigh" and "ages and ages hence." At that imagined time andunspecified place, the voice will have nobly simplified and exalted the whole impulsivematter into a deliberate one of taking the "less traveled" road:

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Is it not the high tone of poignant annunciation that really makes all the difference?An earlier version of the poem had no dash after "I"; presumably Frost added itto make the whole thing more expressive and heartfelt. And it was this heartfelt qualitywhich touched Meiklejohn and the students.

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Yet Frost had written Untermeyer two years previously that "I'll bet not half adozen people can tell you who was hit and where he was hit in my Road Not Taken," andhe characterized himself in that poem particularly as "fooling my way along." Healso said that it was really about his friend Edward Thomas, who when they walked togetheralways castigated himself for not having taken another path than the one they took. WhenFrost sent "The Road Not Taken" to Thomas he was disappointed that Thomas failedto understand it as a poem about himself, but Thomas in return insisted to Frost that"I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them andadvising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on." And though this sort ofadvice went exactly contrary to Frost's notion of how poetry should work, he did onoccasion warn his audiences and other readers that it was a tricky poem. Yet it became apopular poem for very different reasons than what Thomas referred to as "the fun ofthe thing." It was taken to be an inspiring poem rather, a courageous credo stated bythe farmer-poet of New Hampshire. In fact, it is an especially notable instance in Frost'swork of a poem which sounds noble and is really mischievous. One of his notebooks containsthe following four-line thought:

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A close look at the poem reveals that Frost's walker encounters two nearlv identicalpaths: so he insists, repeatedly. The walker looks down one, first, then the other, Indeed, "the passing there / Had worn them reallv about thesame." As if the reader hasn't gotten the message, Frost says for a third time."And both that morning equally lay/ In leaves no step had trodden black." What,then, can we make of the final stanza? My guess is that Frost, the wily ironist, is sayingsomething like this: "When I am old, like all old men, I shall make a myth of mylife. I shall pretend, as we all do, that I took the less traveled road. But I shall belying." Frost signals the mockingly self-inflated tone of the last stanza byrepeating the word "I," which rhymes - several times - with the inflated word"sigh." Frost wants the reader to know that what he will be saying, that he tookthe road less traveled, is a fraudulent position, hence the sigh.